Columbus Magnet Celebrates Many Cultures

Parents join students to share diversity of heritage

It was a world of color and culture at Columbus Magnet School Tuesday morning.

"This is a culmination of everything we've been working on for the last couple of months," said second grade teacher Lauren Baker. "So this may look like a lot of work, but it was everything leading up to it that was a lot of work."

Parent volunteers joined 46 students and teachers for the 9th annual second grade culture fair, featuring art activities, music, dance and a variety of foods representing numerous countries and several U.S. States.

"It's different every year because of the mix of the children - we never know what backgrounds, where they're coming from," said instructional assistant Terry Lakin.

"There's a lot of lemons in Greece," said one student. "And they use like 50 percent of them to put in food."

"India's national animal is the royal Bengal tiger and the peacock," said another student.

"One of the things I love most about England is, it's a very old nation unlike America, which is a kind of a younger nation," said parent Timothy Brewer. "It's nice to look at a older nation and the continent of Europe really and just learn how interesting it is to look back hundreds of years."

"They can help Bangladesh's poor people and have feelings for Bangladesh," said Neznin Sulthne, a parent representing Bangladesh. "That's why I try to teach everything about Bangladesh. A lot of poor people, they don't have money to buy dolls. They (cover it) in cloth and they make their own doll."

Every year the school's second graders research their own heritage before sharing it with their class and the rest of the school.

"We're tying to pull in all of the different Common Core standards," said Baker. "Researching, writing, video taping."